Seven questions that move the operator between an old way and a new way of carrying belief. The entry point to the practice. Worked alone or in a leadership team.
Field Guide is the entry-point practitioner instrument in the Foundership body of work. Seven questions, worked in order, that surface the distance between what an operator says they believe and what their decisions actually carry. The exercises are designed to be done in writing — alone, in a leadership team, or across a peer cohort doing the work at the same time.
It is not a manual. It is not a workbook. It is a working instrument with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The discoveries it surfaces are the operator's own. The framework names them.
The point is for you to write what surfaces. There are no answers to look up.
Each question has the same shape: a question to sit with, a frame to read, a specific exercise to do, and a phrase that lands at the end. Set aside two hours minimum. The questions can be worked in one sitting or across a week. They cannot be worked in your head.
The articulation you walk in with — verbatim, in your own words. Not the polished mission statement. The surface signal.
Ninety days of decisions, examined honestly. The hires, the firings, the time allocation, the relationships protected and the ones let slip. The truer signal than statement.
Reading Q1 and Q2 side by side. The named distance between what you say and what you do. The Founder's Gap surfaced in your own writing.
Specific, named costs already paid. The small ones — the costs that accrued slowly. The Founder's Gap doesn't announce itself with a crisis.
Three named things. Each with an owner, a cadence, and a definition of what protection looks like specifically. The save list is operational.
The people and structures that depend on you keeping your word. Customers, employees, partners, family, your founding self. Binding on both sides.
The operator wiring is the asset, not the obstacle. Don't change what you're doing. Change the environment you're doing it in.
The work is interior, and anyone who does it absorbs the founder's architecture by walking the founder's discipline. You don't have to have founded the thing to use this.
If you started the company, this names what you've been carrying. The articulation you've never had time to write down. The architecture under the practice you've been running on instinct.
If you were hired into the seat, this gives you the architecture to lead with destination — the same destination-orientation a founder would carry, earned by doing the founder's interior work.
If you're moving from one arena to another — service to civilian life, employee to operator, follower to source — this is the bridge between what you were doing and what's coming next.
Field Guide is delivered as a printed monograph — uncoated stock, sewn binding, sized for the writing the operator will do in the margins. The exercises require a pen, a notebook, and two hours. The book is the object that holds the practice in place.
Field Guide names what operators have been doing without language for it. Nothing in it is brand new. It is an arrangement of work other people did first, in other rooms, for other reasons, that turned out to fit.
One question per card. Pulled when a question is needed — when something is surfacing and needs surfacing more deliberately.
A year-long passage. Twelve stages, fifty-two weeks, one card per week paired with the work.
Facilitated leadership-team engagement. Where the work done privately becomes the work the team does together.
Single copies for individual operators. Cohort orders for leadership teams. Partner-branded co-editions for accredited distribution channels — Ramsey, EntreLeadership, Black Rifle Coffee Company.